Customer Reviews

Cows

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4 star:		(7)
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Whooo Hoooo! This has got to be the most intense book I have ever read. I know I say that with the regularity of a chiming clock, but "Cows" by Matthew Stokoe really takes the cake. Creation Books apparently prints some other extreme titles, probably ones that may be even more visceral than this one, but Stokoe's devastating portrait of a man's need to belong is simply unforgettable. The author has another novel out, called "High Life," that promises to be as unsettling as this story. It may be some time before I muster the necessary fortitude to read that one, though. Yes, "Cows" is that disturbing. There is a warning label on the back cover of the book, if that tells you anything.

"Boy meets Cow," trumpets the back cover, but that is only part of the story. "Cows" relates the pathetic story of Steven, a down on his luck, alienated man living in a disheveled tenement building in England. Steve lives with his dear old mum, a woman so repulsive in appearance and manner that her son refers to her as the "Hagbeast." Our protagonist despises this woman to such an extreme, with a mutual feeling on the part of his mother, that he spends his days and nights in bed with Dog (his crippled pet dog) plotting how to break free from her controlling influences. He is even convinced that his mother is trying to kill him through the obnoxious meals she forces him to eat everyday. There isn't much chance of this momma's boy shedding his chains, as he consistently caves in under his sick whims. The only options for eventual freedom arrives in the form of his new job at the packinghouse and through a potential love affair with Lucy, a girl who lives upstairs.

Problems with these hopes quickly emerge. Lucy is, well, completely insane. She spends her days obsessing about the poisons building up inside every human being. By watching videos of operations and through painful self-examinations, Lucy hopes to discover the location of these internal toxins in order to remove them from her own body. Steven recognizes Lucy's illnesses but fervently hopes that he can create a world where the two will live together, have a child, and mirror the perfect family world he sees on his television set every night. In the meantime, Steve will have to deal with his mother and work at the packinghouse so he can earn money to actualize his visions.

Then there is the job at the slaughterhouse. Steven quickly falls in with Cripps, the head supervisor in the room where they actually kill the cattle. This aberrant human being recognizes Steven's lack of character and starts to indoctrinate him with philosophies about how killing animals imbues men with power in all the other avenues of their lives. Adding to the general madness is the discovery by Steven of a rogue herd of talking cows living underneath the city. These cows escaped from the oily clutches of Cripps and his fellow thugs and are now seeking revenge against the evil men working on the killing floor. Which path will Steven choose? Will he accept Cripps's nauseating, fascistic visions or will he work with the talking cows and purge the world of an evil human being?

Turning a page in this book is like repeatedly dropping an anvil on your head. You are not certain of what you will find on the next page, but you soon discover that it will be so far over the top as to defy description. "Cows" encompasses nearly every anti-social behavior imaginable. There are scatological excesses galore, mind-blowing violence, weirdness on a metatectonic level, and stark examinations of power relationships. There is a message in "Cows," but the crushing amount of gore nearly buries it under a mountain of ground beef.

This is a story about dreams and how environment can crush those gossamer longings. Steven wants to live; he wishes he had a caring mother, a beautiful and loving wife, a nice house, a child, and all the amenities of modern life. He sees the images on television depicting a perfect life and thinks he can achieve these things in his own existence. His difficulties in connecting to society in no way lessen his desire to do so. Steven's internal condition is so fragile and fragmented that he is an easy target for the likes of Cripps, who promises self-realization and authenticity through violence if Steven will only take the plunge. One problem comes when Steven thinks he can save Lucy as well as himself. When his visions of perfection come apart at the seams, when one action towards living the dream requires greater and more violent actions to sustain them, Steven disintegrates and becomes something worse than even Cripps and everything is lost. It does not help that Steven's ideals are built on an illusion anyway, namely the vacuous world of television. He is doomed from the start without even realizing it.

This book does not have a happy, fairy-tale ending. It is rather a series of painful, tentative steps by a man who desperately needs something to live for. I commend Stokoe for weaving such a penetrating vision in a quickly read story. I do not, however, have warm feelings for the passages that almost made me bolt for the bathroom. I have an iron stomach, but "Cows" nearly did me in. Only the stoutest souls need crack the cover on this book.

Matthew Stokoe, Cows (Creation Books, 1997)

I'm not normally one to preface a review, or even mention in a review, when a book is not appropriate for certain audiences. (I hope to have duped a few of the weak-stomached into reading, say, Peter Sotos or Pan Pantziarka, because they deserve being read). But I'm going to start this one by saying, quite bluntly, Cows is not for everyone. In fact, Cows may not be for anyone. It is scatological, offensive, disgusting, filled to the brim with sex, violence, and sexual violence, and is probably capable of inciting nausea in those who are perfectly capable of sitting through atrocity footage and watch driving school videos for fun.

Cows is also visionary, brilliant, amazingly complex, a must on my ten best reads of the year list, and the second full-length piece of fiction I have finished in less than twenty-four hours this year. It's not only so nasty you can't look away, but it is supremely, blindingly great.

Matthew Stokoe's debut novel can best be summarized as follows. Take a healthy dollop of Horatio Alger (tempered with a dash of Alger Hiss), mix in a good dose of China Mieville's King Rat, a shot of Robert Bloch, add a couple of jiggers of Peter Sotos, ten drams of Camus, two shakes of David Mamet, bung in a couple of PETA ads of the most offensive variety, and then dump the whole mess into a shaker lined with Stewart Home. Shake, chill, and serve over ice cubes laced with LSD, rat poison, and Hideshi Hino films. One taste and you have scraped the tip of the iceberg that is Cows.

Steven, the protagonist, is not a happy person. His paraplegic dog, named Dog, was crippled years back by his mother, known affectionately throughout as the Hagbeast. He's twenty-five years old, and the only time he's left the flat is to run up to the roof and stare out over the city (presumably London) and imagine what life is like for normal people. After the roof got old, he started watching television obsessively, coming to believe that American sitcom families from the fifties led normal lives, and guaging happiness by those standards. As the novel opens, Steven is on his way to his first day of work, ever, at a slaughterhouse. He has a new upstairs neighbor named Lucy, who just moved in and after whom he lusts, a foreman named Cripps who takes maybe a bit too much of a fatherly interest in Steven, and something watching him from the ventilation system in the slaughterhouse.

As if that's not enough, Lucy is convinced that all the poisons in human beings (mucous, excrement, etc.) are to be found in large black lumps mixed in with the organs, and ceaselessly dissects things trying to find them; Steven is convinced the Hagbeast is trying to kill him by feeding him undercooked pork; the thing in the vents is getting more insistent; Cripps wants to teach Steven the ins and outs of cow-killing. Life, to say the least, is a mess for Steven, until everything falls into place at once and he begins to understand who he really is.

On the surface, Cows is an exceptionally offensive novel. It doesn't take too much analysis, though, to realize that the offense here is aimed with a deadly precision, and Stokoe weighed every word carefully in order to smack the reader into wakefulness throughout. Once you've understood that, unearthing the subtleties underneath becomes that much easier. Steven is a fantastically-drawn character whose emotions are never less than real (though as Guernsey tells him, there's nothing at all normal about Steven; that we can identify with him at all is a work of literary mastery). The rest of the characters are all caricatures of some sort (one is tempted to map them onto the seven deadly sins in a piece of textual analysis), but despite this are are very well presented and, with the exception of the Hagbeast (who is drawn as completely evil) empathetic; Cripps may be a power-hungry perverted moron, but there's enough of the father figure in him for us to see him, briefly, as Steven must after first meeting him, for example. The situations and the characters are all throughly blown out of proportion, but the grittiness with which Stokoe sets his scenes makes his dystopian vision as real to the reader as the backdrops of Ridley Scott's marvelous film Balderunner.

None of this is truly astounding; many of the same strengths can be found in much of Creation's output (these same strengths, for example, are what make Pantziarka's House of Pain so much more readable than Jeremy Reed or the erotic novels of Anne Rice, for example). Where Stokoe truly transcends is in the tenderness with which he treats Steven's odd love triangle, and the subtle power struggle between Steven and Guernsey through the latter half of the novel. Ultimately, whatever the message one takes away from the book (the late Kathy Acker, for excample, brandished it as a banner for the vegan movement), at its core are those relationships.

You will either love Cows or hate it. You will emerge from it disgusted, mystified, or both. But you will not read Cows and finish it unchanged. D>Tour magazine called Cows "the Wasp Factory of the nineties." Whether Stokoe will achieve the same status that Banks has is a long way from being seen, but it is impossible to deny that Cows is a deeply moving, very important novel that should not be missed. (...)

At this point this is the most gruesome book I have ever read. I knew it would be gross when I started reading it, however I did not realize just how gross it would be. There was a scene which seriously made me gag over the toilet (literaly) and I have a high tolerance for this kind of stuff. Part of the reason was because the writing style is great, very literary yet easy to read. It was easy to become immersed in the world. However, I never fully connected to the character. In some ways I could understand his emotions, but in other ways his actions were just too irrational to make complete since. There was a fairy tale quality to part of the story and I really enjoyed this aspect of it. It added to the surreal environment without letting up on the grue factor. If you have a strong stomach and like your literature on the extreme or strange side then I recommend this book. Seriously though if you have a low tolerance for the disgusting steer far clear from this book.

Cows is a fable about an "outsider" (in that classic literary sense) who begins a process of self-discovery while working at a slaughterhouse. His many impediments include his vile mother/beast, a female companion who is mainly concerned with being diseased, and his employer at work, who provides a whole new perspective on the ideal form of, for lack of a better term, "bovine companionship". And let's not forget the sentient talking cows, who wish to incite a revolution...

I must first mention that I find Cows to be more of a novella than a fully-fledged novel. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I can't help but wishing that it was a bit longer. The width and breadth of the insanity covered within could have surely covered another few hundred pages.

That being said, Stokoe has really put out a wonderful piece of literature here. Cows manages the feat of not only being, by generally accepted standards, utterly savage and repulsive; it is also laced with a great deal of well-defined irony and humour. This is what separates Stokoe from most of the so-called "artistes/provocateurs" who push out fiction that skirts along the frayed edges of censorship. While those writers hide behind their obvious attempts of shocking their prospective audience with their absolute nihilistic approach to sadism, Stokoe whips it out and challenges anyone to prove that he's off the mark.

For the record, he's so close to the mark that most people will not be able to get beyond the first few pages. The truth...she hurts, yes?

COWS is Bataille-like in its use of disgust as a pathway to sublimity--as if James Ellroy wrote a novel based on a Paul McCarthy performance. It's absurd, titillating mental self-abuse--yet clearly Mr. Stokoe knows how to tell a good story, and create sympathetic (if putrid) characters. Even beyond that, he's got some kind of powerful moral compass, a deep interest in human existence. I'm a horror fan, but this goes way beyond, knee-deep in the poetics of filth. I expected to feel bad/ill/guilty for having read it, but oddly I actually felt the moral boost that comes from digesting something important. I'm not sure we need art like this, frankly--I certainly wouldn't want to catch my kids reading it--yet I feel that it's worth reading, if you can stomach it, that is. I just ordered his follow-up "High Life" from AbeBooks (got it for only $14.95) and am dreading/looking forward to reading it.

though a pleasant and nice guy in real life, Matthew Stokoe'simagination is a sick and twisted place indeed. If you're squeamishabout blood, (----) and death, or [especially] if you're a vegetarian, this is not the book for you. Graphic and grim, Cows explores the relationship between Stephen and his mother, his seriously unhinged girlfriend, and his demented co-workers at the slaughterhouse. Stephen discovers a tribe of sentient cows living underneath the slaughterhouse and leads them on a journey of self-discovery. A very visceral and enjoyable book...

Wow, where do I even begin in reviewing this book? For a book that is a mere 188 pages long, it sure reached out at me, slapped me around the face, sprayed its vile language, violence and cow juices all over me and then left me feeling empty and sorry for the character at the end. Reading this book was not a pleasant experience, in fact, I have never had so much trouble getting through a book in my life. Not because it was boring or slow but because its content made me stop, put it down and pick it up later. I even stopped myself from reading it before bed as one night I did that and I couldn't sleep for hours, stuck with the images that this book so kindly gave me. I have read some full on books, in fact, I am a morbid bitch who loves to find the most shocking books and movies around just to see if I can stomach them. I finally met my match. I finally found something that made me squirm. Matthew Stokoe's "Cows" was that book I never thought I would find.

Cows is a simple yet hugely complex story about Stephen, a pathetic 25 year old that still lives in his mother's flat with his mother. She is a morbidly obese woman whom Stephen hates with a passion, so much so that her name is never used, she is referred to as the "Hag Beast". She has regretted having him from the day he was born and insists on reminding him of this any change she gets. He hates her for this and she hates him right back. But he fears her immensely, he also needs her, he doesn't know what life is like without her, he didn't even leave the little rented flat until he was 5 years of age, causing an intense fear of the outside world and a feeling of never ever belonging there. So he hides in his room, with his crippled dog watching television, dreaming of a life that 'normal' people have. A job, a wife, a child, a family. Something he feels he was never ever made for and may never achieve but he desperately wants to.

All is about to change for Stephen as he heads off to his first day at his first job. He scores a job at the local beef slaughter house. His boss, Cripps, senses that there is something 'off'' about Stephen right away. He introduces Stephen to the slaughter room where he believes that those that kill the cows are the ones with the real power. They are the real men. They can do anything as they have taken life and watched it drain out of their bare hands. Cripps is indeed nuts and so are his workers that work in the slaughter room. Not only do they kill cows but they also use them for sexual pleasure, in the most grotesque of ways. When Stephen is introduced to killing, thanks to Cripps, he changes. He gets a taste for killing and the courage to murder. Now he feels his dream of a 'normal' life may come true. If he can build the courage to get rid of the Hag Beast, he can find someone to love and start a family. He can be like those people on television. Stephen indeed finds a girlfriend, a very unstable one at that, but a girlfriend none the less and his dream seems even closer now. He just may be able to make this happen... However, murder is addictive, the feeling of power is addictive and to increase the story's intensity, the cows at the escaped cows from the slaughter house that live in the sewers are starting to talk to him. They want Stephen to help them have their revenge so Stephen needs to decide if he wants to stay with Cripps and keep slaughtering or if he would prefer to help the cows.

This book is so full of vulgarity, it is really hard to read. But don't get me wrong, the scenes in the slaughter house are actually EASIER to read than the scenes with his mother, or the scenes with his girlfriend, Lucy. His mother is hideous! She is a disgusting human being that says some horrible things and lives in a disgusting fashion. The food she serves up for him is one thing, then her vile way of speaking to him and threatening him is another. Stokoe doesn't just tell you what is going on, you can almost taste the totally intact boiled lamb stomach with the lamb's undigested food still inside it as Stephen is forced to eat is because the Hag Beast tells him so. Stokoe describes Stephen's surroundings, his miserable life, his entrapment in his current world and the world he wants to live in so descriptively that the words grab you and punch you in the face again and again and again. I have never read a book where the "C" word is used so much and more importantly, never read a book in which the word is used in the context it is used in here. "It is just a word!" I thought, that was until I read it in these sentences.

This book has everything a full-on horror book could have and more! Bestiality, murder, slaughter, harsh and disgraceful relationships, a character that is obsessed with the poison inside herself who performs self surgery to find it, animal cruelty, cow stampedes smashing into people making sure that nothing remains is a big pile of blood and pulp, loneliness and isolation and the need for power. But it also has hope, dreams, love, and a tremendous need to belong. If you can find all these things buried in amongst the creative sentences and gore that is.

I understood Stephen to a degree. Feeling how he felt, just wanting a home, a place to fit in, someone to look up to him. That is what kept me reading, to see where his journey would take him. Even when the book got quite bizarre and the talking cows come in, it still kept me reading, wondering, what was Stephen going to do next. And when all his hopes and dreams come crashing down around him, as a reader, you expected it but at the same time you cannot help but feel for him anyway. His loneliness and isolation makes you feel so empty inside and you do wish there was a better life out there for him and that he had had more of a chance from the beginning.

Awesome book, small yet detailed, captivating and nasty. Very psychological despite the gore and guts which made it one hard to read but one intelligent read at the same time. It has indeed left a bad taste in my mouth. Stokoe did his job, gave me a book that I will never forget and will talk about to all my friends as being the 'sickest book I have ever read to date'. He also gave me a character I really felt for. One I wish I could have saved. Definitely give this a go, if you can stomach it.....

Prior to this little adventure, I'd never read a book that made me feel sick. When I first started this one, after just a few pages, I was telling my wife how it seemed to be all shock. The words were gross, as were the situations, but it was missing something. I can read gross words without being grossed out, you know?

But then yesterday, I was reading a little bit in the precious few moments before I had to get ready for work and it started. There was a scene in which the protagonist uses a rather disgusting method of poisoning on his mother. The relationship between this fellow and his mother, affectionately known throughout the text as "the Hagbeast," is somewhat strained. They have a relationship that, let's just say, pushes conventionality.

So I decide that this is a bit too much for it being so early in the day and put it down. I get up and head for the shower.

This is the part where, if you are my lovely wife, you stop reading. I am quite serious. All this will be to everyone else is a weird, kinda creepy little anecdote. To you, it could be life changing. To assuage any fears, it has very little to do with me. Very little. I just want to write this down so that, should I meet this Stokoe fellow at BizarroCon, I can tell him why his book made me sick.

This

Is

The

Blank

Space

I'm

Utilizing

To

Protect

My

Family

So, for the rest of you (and likely for Kristin, too, as I doubt she heeded my warning. Hi, Babe!).....

I walk up to the tub and push aside the glass door. My eyes are immediately attracted to some movement. I look down and see a centipede running laps in the tub. He looks crazy.

I'm not scared of bugs. I don't even care if they walk on me. The used to be a spider who lived in my previous vehicle who would spin webs in my windshield. I'd talk to him throughout my commute and never did anything when he landed on me.

So, I feel there's some need for explanation here. They're going to be spoilers, but I'm going to write them in Morse code so that you can easily skip over them if you don't want to read them.

1) - .... .. ... / --. ..- -.-- / ..-. . . -.. ... / .... .. ... / --- .-- -. / ... .... .. - / - --- / .... .. ... / -- --- - .... . .-. .-.-.-

2) .... . .----. ... / --. --- - / ... --- -- . / ..-. ..- -.-. -.- .. -. --. / -.-. --- .-- ... / - .... .- - / .- .-. . / - .- .-.. -.- .. -. --. / - --- / .... .. -- .-.-.-

3) - .... . .-. . .----. ... / .- / .-.. --- - / --- ..-. / ... . -..- / .-- .. - .... / .- -. .. -- .- .-.. ... --..-- / -.. . .- -.. --..-- / -.. -.-- .. -. --. --..-- / .- -. -.. / .- .-.. .. ...- . .-.-.-

There. Anyway, on we go.

So, I stand there wondering what to do. The centipede seems perturbed and, as I suggested before, a bit nuts. I realized fairly quickly that he must have come up the drain. So, logically, I decided that he'd like to go back down the drain. Moving him outside was unreasonable because I had no tools with which to remove him and because he was really pale and would probably burn easily.

So I turn the water on, hoping to usher him down the drain with the toilet brush. Instead, much to my dismay, when I turn the water on, he bolts toward it like he's just so far gone he can't think anymore. It's like centipedal auto-erotic asphyxiation. He's running happily to his doom. So I'm all, what the cheese?! and he's gone.

For some reason, I start to feel bile rising in my throat. I force it back down, pull the faucet thingy, and get into the shower. The water sprays down and, for a moment, I start to feel okay. I'm willing to dismiss what I've experienced.

But then it happens.

Like a charmed cobra rising from a basket, this creepy cheeser, antennae (or whatever) a-flailing, rose from the depths like a comparably small leviathan. The worst part, I think, was that he appeared to be rising in ecstasy, like he was rising to meet god.

If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't believe it. He was able to raise the bulk of his body straight up until he finally collapsed on the drain cover. He clung to that for a while as he caught his breath.

And then he charged me.

I kicked him and he went flying back toward the drain. Then I jumped from the tub, silently (like a ninja). He resumed his laps, crazy dude that he was, using the force of the pounding water as encouragement. I picked up the toilet brush and, after a few tries, sent him spiraling down the drain. I plugged it and stared for ten minutes as the water rose over my ankles, waiting for that scary turkey to come swimming at me. With all those legs, I shudder to think of how good a swimmer he must have been.

After I finished my shower, I was a gosh darn' wreck. I felt like throwing up. It was all too much. Because when I was able to stop thinking about the centipede, I kept thinking about number one (see Morse code).

These two occurrences can not be considered apart from one another. Both this book and that insect (or whatever) were forged by a sick creator from the same material. If angels are made from love, these things are made from disgust and the way it feels before you throw up.

P.S. I've never before been able to do this and feel like I'm completely telling the truth, but...

Naked Lunch + Fight Club + Animal Farm = Cows

I read high life by matthew stokoe first, because i couldnt find this one for a reasonable price. well, finally i did, and it was worth the wait. both books are great by the way, however, i don't know why people compare this with the wasp factory, it isn't anything like it, and it is much much better. mr. stokoe packs in 200 pages some of the most vile sick stuff i have ever read...stay away from this if you have a weak stomach

This book will [mess] you up. You'll start seeing the people around you as perfect people, mindless bending jellyfish floating in the ocean of television, best movies of the year, and top 10 countdowns.
It changed me.
It made me want to fight to find myself, not to just float about and hope myself finds me. I felt a bit of what Steven felt. Not to that extreme, but I was afraid to go out into the real world just like him. I haven't had a life that would fit in out there.
But now I want to be a leader.
I want a herd.

Beautifully written, beautiful story....I'd recomend this book to anyone of my friends, and not to my family or anyone with a weak stomache.